Like with any of our customers, building this new home is coming with great excitement, joy, stress, and uncertainty. Yes, we have the advantage of experience on our side, but keep in mind: we spend all day doing this for others, and it's much different when it's your own home.
In our heads, we've been planning this for YEARS, but when you put it down on paper and real numbers become involved... all that changes quickly.
We knew two things right off the bat:
The size of the house had to be largely dictated by the size of our new custom design studio. Reasoning: You can't have a tiny house next to a large garage with almost 1000 sq feet of studio space above! It was important for all of our decisions to be functional, economical, and timeless.
We both have always been very attracted to the farmhouse look. If you look back at our first/current home, it too resembles a farmhouse; complete with wrap around porch, swing, and rockers, which is what sold us on it 26 years ago! For Rob, it's like coming full circle, as he actually grew up on a farm. Thank you Google Image Search! We found an exterior photo of a farmhouse we both loved. However, the corresponding interior layout was a flop for our needs and lifestyle.
So, off to the drawing board we went.
The next steps:
Rob and I fully designed our plan Over the course of a few nights and then put it on the kitchen island, where we walked past it day in and day out for a week, tweaking it over and over until it was ready to go to the draftsman. (It should be said we have literal years of experience doing this! We have so much fun with our space planning clients, helping them to revise their current plan to best fit their family needs and lifestyle.)
Sending the plan to the draftsman We finally produced a finished/scaled/dimensioned plan in hopes the turn around time with the draftsman would be faster. (In our next blog or two, we will share some of the parameters - requirements - decisions we had to make while going through the process in order to come up with our own perfect plan.)
Playing the waiting game We had an AMAZING draftsman here in Richmond, VA (Nick Medlin with River Mill Development) thanks to a reference from Kevin Brungard at Blue Ridge Custom Homes. But like I had heard many people say: we did a lot of waiting for our final drafted plans, which we should have expected with the work load most of us are carrying these days.
The issues There's a pretty big chance of having some issues with your plan. That's the beauty of working with an experienced draftsman! For us, there were a few structural issues to work though that Nick was instrumental in helping us to correct.
At the end of this longer than anticipated process, we had a house plan we were completely thrilled with, and we couldn't wait to start on the next leg of this process!
